Scooped

Michael Brandow, a freelance dogwalker in the Village, hadn’t had much luck interesting publishers in a nonfiction manuscript that he’d been working on for the past eight years. In 2006, in the course of his research, he called Alan Beck, a professor of animal ecology at Purdue. Beck happens to edit a line of books about the bond between humans and animals for P.U. Press, and he told Brandow that he’d give the manuscript a look. “I read it and thought, This is a really neat book,” Beck said recently. “So I wrote to our publisher and said, ‘Over the years, I’ve given you a lot of shit, but this is a good one.’ ” The result is a three-hundred-and-thirty-nine-page social history entitled “New York’s Poop Scoop Law: Dogs, the Dirt, and Due Process.” Its bibliography cites, among others, Caro; Scorsese; Dog Run: A Publication of the Washington Square Dog Run Association; and Glickman, L. T., Shofer, F. S., “Zoonotic Visceral and Ocular Larva Migrans,” Veterinary Clinics of North America: Small Animal Practice, Vol. 17, No. 1, January, 1987. Brandow has dedicated the book to “My sweet Samantha,” his shepherd-chow-beagle bitch.

“Dogs, the Dirt, and Due Process” comes out on August 1st, the thirtieth anniversary (a hundred and thirtieth or so, in dog years) of Section 1310 of the New York State Public Health Law, which formally decrees, “It shall be the duty of each dog owner . . . to remove any feces left by his dog on any sidewalk, gutter, street, or other public area,” and which, informally, accounts for the abundance of tightly knotted Gristedes bags in local trash cans. (Pre-1310, the largely ignored “curbing” rule held that animals were supposed to go in the gutter.) Brandow, on the phone the other day from Montreal, where he is spending the summer, admitted that “a lot of people just rolled their eyes” at the mention of his subject, but he sees the law, and the “civil war” that surrounded its adoption, as an urban parable. Notwithstanding a few groaners (“Tension filled the air like the smell of feces that radiated from the pavement,” “The number one complaint was number two”), the story—which begins in Nutley, New Jersey, in 1971 (some citizens band together against a neighborhood Great Dane), crosses the Hudson (a hundred and twenty-five tons of dog shit a day clotting the sidewalks of “Dung City”!), skips to Albany (Koch kicks the issue upstate after the City Council fails to take action), and culminates in New York’s becoming the first big city to force owners to clean up after their dogs—makes a fine Empire State procedural.

There was the usual bureaucratic gridlock: Koch inherited the problem from Beame, who inherited it from Lindsay, a waffler on canine concerns, according to Brandow, whose “known pet affiliations were minimal.” Tin-eared functionaries, too: “You got five cats? And a dog?” one city official asked a woman at a hearing. “Christ. What you need is a good man.” Then you had your community activists—Max Schnapp, of POPA (Pet Owners Protective Association), a labor organizer and the owner of two Great Danes (Tiger and Sampson), a pet crow (Mitzvah), three rabbits (Pinkie, Dutchie, unnamed), a white mouse (Piggy), a baby squirrel (Elmer Wiggley), a gerbil, and half a dozen alley cats (Mau Mau, Nebisch, Sister, Freddy the Freeloader, Monty Wooley), vs. Fran Lee, the founder of Children Before Dogs—grinding out their small-bore issues on the grand stage. “It was an amazing time,” Beck, who was the director of the Bureau of Animal Affairs for the city from 1975 to 1980, recalled. “I was actually caught in the crossfire when dog feces were being thrown back and forth.” (Gross but true: Lee, at a public debate, got smacked in the head by a loaded baggie.)

For the book, Beck was happy to share his collection of memorabilia, including various cleanup devices, some of which, Brandow writes, were modelled on fruit pickers. “The drawings, they’re like looking at eighteenth-century flying contraptions or something,” he said. “There was one that supposedly had some sort of mechanical jaws and a flashlight attachment for evening scooping.”

Amid Doggy Tongs, Pooch Scoops, and Scoop de Doos, there is an original pooper scooper: U.S. Patent #3,685,088, formal title “Means for Collecting a Dog’s Excrement by the Dog’s Owner or Walker.” A cardboard shovel strapped to the hand by rubber bands, it was invented by Henry Doherty, an unemployed office manager from Wayne, New Jersey, and, while the Lindsay administration endorsed the contrivance, it is not Brandow’s preferred method. “I think it’s a waste of money,” Brandow said. “I steal as many bags as I can from the Korean grocer when I go there to buy vegetables.” ♦

Lauren Collins began working at The New Yorker in 2003 and became a staff writer in 2008.